Dynamips and Dynagen – What I Have Learned so Far
I was easily able to run two 7200s on my MacBook Pro, though it is fairly beefy for a laptop, having 8G RAM etc. It turns out that the Dynagen needs to be told to use RAM as opposed to disk, e.g.
mmap = false
The two routers could easily run IS-IS and BGP between them.
One can configure just about any kind of interface, so one can emulate a real configuration.
It is easy to connect to the outside world, just do something in the family of
[[ROUTER R1]]
f0/0 = NIO_gen_eth:en0
(any interface will do), and then configure the specified interface on the router for a real IP on your local LAN and it just bridges out. Note that this did not seem to work when my Mac was on WiFi, only on Ethernet. I suspect it has something to do with the MacOS X’s WiFi, the dreaded proxy ARP, and bridging. But I really did not take the time to debug it. I imagine hard-wired Ethernet will still be around for a year or two.
This allowed me to trivially multi-hop BGP peer with one of my real routers, r0.sea, the 7200 in the Westin. But, if I configured R1 as a 7200 with an NPE-400 and 512MB of RAM, it would crash before it loaded a full feed. If I configured it as an NPE-G2, G1 is not available, the configuration would not come up in Dynagen, and crashed out. While I am not sure I need a full feed to my MacBook :), it would be nice for certain things.
All in all, this looks like a cool tool, and I plan to keep it around.
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